Last weekend I hosted a 90s party for my London marathon fundraising. Although I had assured everyone it was only fancy dress if you fancied it, I was desperate to wear my vintage Geri Halliwell dress from 1997.
Trouble was, 23 years later and after 2 c-sections I am not the size 8 I was back then. Especially as all this marathon training has made me bulk up a bit. I have put on nearly a stone in weight, mostly muscle but my body shape has changed dramatically to build the muscle in the right places. (And I have been eating waaaay too many chocolate hobnobs under the guise of ‘carb loading’).
So when I went to put it on it was tight and more than a little bit short.
I tried that dress on so many times in the week before the party. I worried it was too short, I worried it was too tight and showed off my mummy (chocolate hobnob) tummy too much. I felt massively self conscious.
My husband was a dream. He knew better than to say it was too short or too tight and went with a very diplomatic ‘wear whatever you want to’ with a big smile on his face as he remembered me wearing it the first time around.
I showed my daughters (15 and almost 13) and they had interesting reactions. My eldest used her autism and teenage year to get away with a rude comment about disowning me if I went out in public wearing that. My more empathic almost teen understood my I wanted to wear it and helped me find a solution.
With the help of black tights and my daughter’s PE shorts to keep me respectable I wore that dress with pride. No one else dressed up, but I didn’t care. I was embracing Girl Power and doing Geri proud.
The next day I took the dress out the washing machine and gave it a bit of a stretch to reshape it whilst it was damp. It was a 23 year old dress from a very cheap shop, I knew it needed a bit of help these days, I bit like me! As I pulled it around I heard some stitches snap and my heart sank, ‘oh no, have I stretched it too far?’
It had turned inside out when I pulled it off in exhaustion the night before and as I hung it up to inspect the damage I had just caused I had to smile. The stitches had come apart, but they weren’t the seams, I noticed a run of bright blue stitching along each side seam, back in 1997 I had obviously taken the dress in! Back then it wasn’t tight enough.
I had been wrangling all week over expectations that were outdated. 23 years outdated in fact. I was trying to live up to something that was way in the past.
What an analogy!
It got me thinking about what other expectations we put on ourselves that are massively outdated.
Being a good mum for example. Do we judge ourselves against our own upbringing, think we should be more like our own mums? Do they put that pressure on us? Or even our friends who were mums before us. Do we look at how they did it and try to emulate them too much? Being a mum in 2020 is a very different ball game to being a mum in previous decades.
The tech issue, what social media should we let out kids have, how much screen time should they have? If we are basing our expectations on that of our predecessors we are building ourselves up for a fail because we are leading the way in this. It is all new and we need to navigate it ourselves. Set our own agendas and expecatations.
Being a working mum, or a stay at home mum, comes with expectations and again they are probably outdated. How our mums did it 30 or 40 years ago is very different to how we can and want to do it now. And that’s ok. There are more opportunities for us to pursue and our partners want to take a more active role anyway compared to our childhoods.
Those words “back in my day” and “when I was growing up” and “that’s not how it happened in my day” need to only be used for nostalgic looks back in history.
Because that it was it is, history.
We are living in a new and very different world and our expectations need to be adjusted. Just think how more comfortable I would had been if I had discovered that stitching before the party and let the dress out to it’s proper size. How much more confident I would have felt if I had found out my expectations could be altered to the here and now.
We are not living in the past, we are living in the now and in the future. What seams do you need to let out in your life?
